Project Information:
This work was done as a team assignment for a course 'Information and Interaction Design'. We had to work in a team of 4 and were assigned milestones in order to complete the project and present it in form of a team website. Although all the team members had a part in every step of the process, my Primary Responsibilities were: Conducting interviews and taking notes using Otter.io, transcribing the information obtained from interviews in Miro, co-ordinating the task with the team members using google sheet.
Process
1
Ideation
3
Analysis
5
Final
Design
Conduct initial research, set the project focus, finalize research questions, finalize methodology, etc.
2
Interviews
Transcribe interview data, create an affinity diagram, build user personas, etc.
4
Prototyping
Finalize design elements, generate hi-fi prototype, finalize the design.
Recruit participants for contextual inquiry, finalize the interview questions, conduct interviews, gather data, etc.
Create user flow based on data analysis, generate lo-fi prototypes, etc.
Milestone 1: Project Focus
Sep 05, 2021 - Sep 09, 2021
A study suggests that women spend 17 minutes a day debating what outfit to wear. Whereas, men spend up to 13 minutes rifling through their wardrobe. This equates to four days a year for women and three days for men wasted. Also color sets up the mood for an individual one for a particular day. So clothing actually impacts how well a given day will be.
Stakeholders:
Fashion Designers
Retail Clothing Stores
Shoppers
Approach:
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Before getting into the actual research phase, we decided to set up the team principle and guidelines. Then we did an extensive background study on the color trends that people are following around the globe. For that, we used various platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and a limited set of popular clothing websites.
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In the initial user research, we started with the students of RIT to understand how they pick their outfits and the dress color combinations they are familiar with through contextual inquiry. From the interviews, we obtained categorized information on users' shopping and dressing behaviors by drawing out the affinity diagram.
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Through the affinity diagram, we drew similar behaviors and characteristics to create a persona and with that, we decided to refine our problem statement to address the needs, goals, and points for the persona.
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We also carried out a little brainstorm session to develop various ideas for designing an interactive prototype to validate our assumptions and self-evaluate the process we took.
Milestone 2: Contextual Inquiry
Sep 20, 2021 - OCT 01, 2021
In this milestone, we did contextual inquiry a total of 8 participants: 8 individual interviews. The process started with a discussion about preparing the questionnaire and identifying the participants' list. Then we scheduled interviews with the participants where we asked them our questions.
AFFINITY diagram:
Interpretation:
We gained a lot of insights from the interviews, the group discussion, and the interpretation session. The interviews brought up many new user pain points which helped us find out ways to improve the overall user experience like asking questions to the user to gain data and provide a more personalized experience to the user. We might have overlooked some aspects that affect the selection of outfits like the weather which was the most common aspect for the participants. Some insights varied greatly among the participants. For example, purchasing pattern: some participants prioritized brand, some prioritized design, for some it was the color, while some prioritized price/budget.
Milestone 3: Personas
oct 07, 2021 - oct 22, 2021
Based on the results of the contextual inquiry, we identified four main groups of users and created a persona to reflect each of their personalities.
Understanding the user’s motivations and their problems with their existing apps helped us identify opportunities and create user-centered designs.
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Milestone 4: Low-Fidelity Prototype
oct 23, 2021 - oct 29, 2021
We created an User Flow based on the personas and designed the low-fidelity prototype in Figma.
Future Work:
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We can add a smart device to the wardrobe which will connect to the app so that the users do not have to manually add their outfits.
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From a stakeholder perspective, the outfit suggestion could be based on the new models that arrived in the store and educate the user on how the style will look on them.
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Also, integration with social media platforms could be a game-changer as it can help the community to understand the clothing trends better and make better choices.
Reflection
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We learned how to conduct a contextual inquiry.
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Creating affinity diagrams to find relationships between concepts and ideas from a large number of data.
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Using prototyping tools effectively to create low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes.
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Working in a team effectively using team collaboration features on various platforms.